Playwright Festivals, Part 2: Paul Rudnick Month!

A week or so ago, I noted that two concurrent stagings of plays by the same writer ( Mrs. Mannerly at the Alley and A Picasso at Stages) constituted an “unofficial Jeffrey Hatcher Festival.” And I wondered why we don’t see more such coordinated programming offering multiple works by worthy playwrights, whether staged consecutively or simultaneously.

Well, Theatre New West and Unhinged Productions (and their respective artistic directors, Joe Watts and Joe Angel Babb) have called my bluff by designating March as Paul Rudnick Month

Theatre New West will present Rudnick’s The New Century, March 3-April 3 at Sirrom Studio. Unhinged Productions will present Rudnick’s The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, March 12-March 28 at Frenetic Theatre.

Rudnick is known for such widely-produced stage comedies as I Hate Hamlet and Jeffrey and his screenplays including Addams Family Values and In & Out. His forte is writing hilarious, wryly witty dialogue with a decidedly gay sensibility. The New York Times’ appraisal is typical: “Line by line, Rudnick may be the funniest writer for the stage in the U.S. today.”

The New Century, premiered off-Broadway in 2008, consists of four related playlets about relationships between gay people and their parents. The first three are monologues; the fourth playlet brings the three previously seen characters together under surprising and comical circumstances in a hospital.

The Most Fabulous Story, premiered off-Broadway in 1998, is Rudnick’s wacky, irreverent and unabashedly gay re-telling of the creation myth, beginning in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Steve and Jane and Mabel and following their adventures all the way to contemporary Manhattan.

You might say this Rudnick Festival is already underway, unofficially. I Hate Hamlet, perhaps his best known play, is going into its final weekend at the Texas Repertory Theatre Company, 14243 Stuebner Airline. Produced on Broadway in 1991, the droll backstage comedy centers on a TV actor whose sitcom has been canceled, who reluctantly returns to New York to star as Hamlet. The actor doesn’t much care for Shakespeare, especially Hamlet. But as he has leased the apartment that once belonged to fabled actor John Barrymore, and as the Great Profile’s irascible ghost still haunts the place, the TV guy finds himself being coached in the role by one of its most celebrated interpreters. (It’s a typically nifty Rudnick premise and, on Broadway, made a great vehicle for showy Brit star Nicol Willliamson as Barrymore.)